The Competition

by Marcia Clark

  Janice nodded and turned to look at me. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll put it in writing and on tape if you like.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “But it would help if we could talk to her alone,” I said. “We need her to try and remember a lot of details, and having someone else listening can be a distraction.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but it was the best I could come up with off the cuff.

  Janice looked uncertain. “I think I’d rather—”

  “Mom, it’s okay. I’m not a baby. Let me do this. And you need to get to work anyway. These guys can take me to school when we’re done.”

  Janice studied her daughter. “No, I’m staying here. Work can wait. But I won’t sit with you, okay? I’ll just be in the den…”

  Amanda sighed. “Okay.”

  Janice scanned us all with one last look of concern, then left the room. Amanda moved to the wing chair and tucked her feet under her. I picked up where we’d left off. “When was the last time you went to a gun show?”

  “Last spring. I wasn’t that interested, but Evan wanted to go.”

  “Was that out here in Colorado? Or in Texas?”

  “Here, in Colorado Springs.”

  “So he traveled out here to see you?”

  “Not just me. He said he had some family out in Utah.”

  “Did he come alone or bring a friend?”

  “He brought Logan.” Amanda swallowed, her expression wary. “He’s the guy…the other shooter, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Was he friendly with you?” Amanda let her hair fall all the way across her face. The gesture couldn’t have been more obvious. “It’s not your fault, Amanda. There was no way for you to know.”

  After a few moments, she nodded. “He…sorta had a crush on me. But I got the feeling it was mostly because he always wanted what Evan had.”

  “And were you Evan’s girlfriend?”

  Amanda nodded shyly. I saw a faint tinge of pride before she dropped her eyes. “We got together just before I moved out here. Back in Lubbock, we saw each other every day, but we didn’t really get, like, involved until about a month before I left.” Amanda gazed off into the distance of her memory, a happier place. “Evan could get any girl he wanted. Even last year’s junior prom queen. She was a model. And he was just a sophomore.”

  Wow. Imagine. “So he was pretty popular?”

  Amanda stared at the floor. “Yeah. I figured he’d never be into somebody like me.”

  He never was. But I wouldn’t be the one to give her that painful news. “Was that gun show the first time you met Logan?”

  “Yeah. Actually, that was the only time I ever saw him. After that visit, Logan wrote to me for a little while, but then he stopped.”

  “Letters? Or emails?”

  “Letters.”

  “Did you answer him?”

  “Sure. I felt sorry for him. He seemed kind of…sad, you know? He wrote a lot about how he’d always felt so alone, how no one ‘got’ him—”

  “Not even Evan?”

  “No. But I never thought he and Evan were that tight. Evan never talked about Logan, and Logan hardly ever mentioned Evan in his letters. That’s why when I heard Logan might be a suspect, it never occurred to me that Evan could be…” Amanda stopped and bit her lip. She blinked rapidly, then continued. “Anyway, I got the feeling Logan just liked being able to hang out with someone that cool. Someone who wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  “And Evan wasn’t afraid of anything?” I’d never seen that kind of swagger. But I’d only seen the act. Not the real Evan. I’d bet the guy Amanda saw was closer to the truth.

  “Yeah. Nothing scared Evan. Logan thought that was amazing.” Amanda’s face crumpled, and she wiped away a tear that escaped from the corner of her eye. “I did too.”

  I knew where her thoughts were taking her. I tried to nip it in the bud. “It makes perfect sense for you to be sad that Evan isn’t the person you thought he was. But if you’re feeling guilty about it, you have to stop.” Amanda bit her lip. The pain in her eyes was heartbreaking. “Evan’s a very good actor. He fooled a lot of people for quite a long time—us included. And it’s our job to spot guys like that. So let yourself off the hook, okay?” Amanda nodded without looking up. I hoped my words would sink in eventually. But right now, I had to move on. “So Logan confided in you about feeling lonely and depressed. Did he ever say anything about suicide?”

  “Never, like, ‘I’m gonna do it.’ More like it was something he used to think about when he was a kid.” Amanda pushed her hair back. “If he’d said something about wanting to kill himself right then, I’d have told someone. For sure.”

  Talk of past suicidal thoughts could just be typical melodramatic teenage posturing. Or it could be an oblique way of talking about serious current suicidal ideation. Obviously, Logan’s talk was the latter. But there was no way for Amanda to have known that. “You say he wrote to you for a while, then stopped. How come?”

  “I think he could tell from my emails that Evan and I were together, and I wasn’t into anything more than being friends.”

  “Do you still have those letters from Logan?”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  I was too. They might not have been terribly illuminating, but any little bit of information would’ve helped. The more we could learn about these shooters, the better we’d be at spotting them in the future. Maybe. “Let’s get back to the gun show. Did he or Logan buy any guns?”

  “They couldn’t. But I remember they went off on their own for a while.” Amanda tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I couldn’t find them, and my dad was, like, ‘where are they’? It was so uncool. He was pissed.”

  “Did you see either of them with a gun after the show?” I asked.

  “No. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have one. They could’ve found someone to buy a gun for them. That happens sometimes.”

  Yes, it did. The picture was becoming clearer. I’d bet Evan had sized up Amanda as someone he could use right from jump. I doubted he knew exactly how she’d be of use to him when she moved to Colorado. But he was obviously capable of long-range thinking and he knew a valuable asset when he saw one. So when he found out she was moving, he made Amanda his girlfriend. After all, what did it take? A bit of romancing before she left, some phone calls now and then after she’d moved. And it had paid off. I had no doubt that by the time he and Logan went to the gun show with Amanda, their plans for Fairmont High were well under way.

  So now I knew why Evan had trusted her to mail the letters to me. What I still didn’t get was why she’d done it.

  72

  I had to be careful how I segued back into the subject of Evan’s letters to me. A sharp turn into serious territory like that could push Amanda into panic mode and make her clam up. I decided to approach it from the relationship angle. “Did Evan say he still wanted to be a couple after you moved? Or did you guys become just friends at that point?”

  Amanda blushed a little. “He said he didn’t want to give me up.” She floated away for a moment. “Evan always told me I was special. That he could really talk to me—not like the other girls. He said they were lame, that they only cared about their clothes and their makeup and who was sleeping with who…”

  “He made you feel special.” Amanda nodded. “What did you and Evan talk about?”

  “Everything. How stupid politicians are and how the sheeple keep voting for them because they get taken in by campaign promises that’re obvious lies—”

  “Any specific politicians?” The sheeple. Stupid. Lies. A grandiose indictment of both the voters and the candidates. Typical of a psychopath. And Amanda’s delivery sounded like it came straight from the horse’s mouth. If that horse were a sociopath.

  Amanda frowned. “Probably, but I can’t remember. He said he wanted to go over to Iraq. He’d kill the bad guys and end this thing fast.”

  No, he wouldn’t. It was too dangerous. E
van was no hero; he killed like a coward. “So you guys stayed close after you moved?”

  “Definitely. We Skyped or talked on the phone.”

  “You didn’t email?” I asked.

  Amanda shook her head. “Evan had a thing about emailing. He said he didn’t trust it.”

  “Did he stay with you during the gun show?”

  “No. They drove out in Logan’s car and took off afterwards. Evan said he had to visit his relatives in Utah.”

  Or something. We knew that was a lie. The family in Utah said they hadn’t seen Logan in years. “Was that the last time you saw Evan?”

  “Yeah.”

  Time to get to the point. “And you guys never wrote letters to each other?”

  “No, never.”

  “So what did you think when he sent you those letters and told you to mail them to me?”

  Amanda shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think anything. It was just a favor he needed, so I did it. I mean, it wasn’t that big a deal. He sent the letters along with his other stuff.”

  Bailey and I exchanged a look. “What other stuff?”

  “Um, notebooks.”

  My ears perked up. “Notebooks? What was in them?”

  “I don’t know. When he sent them to me they were all sealed up, and he told me not to open them.”

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “He said they were poems and stories and stuff like that. He was going to send them to an agent, to get published. But he didn’t want anyone to see them because they might steal his ideas.”

  “What did he want you to do with them?”

  “Just keep them safe where no one could see them.”

  “Did he just recently send them to you?”

  “Not all of them. He started sending them to me a while ago. But the last two he sent were recent. Those were the ones that had the letters with them.”

  “And you never thought to question why he needed you to forward those letters for him?”

  Amanda shook her head. “I know it sounds stupid.” New tears gathered in her eyes. “I—he was my boyfriend. I trusted him. So I went along with it. And now I don’t know why.”

  I gave her a sympathetic nod. “Those notebooks, do you still have them?”

  Amanda tucked her hair behind her ear and began to play with the drawstring on her hoodie. “Yeah, but…I promised him.”

  We could probably justify a search warrant and tear the place up looking for those notebooks, but that would take time. And time was exactly what we didn’t have. “Amanda, no you didn’t.” She looked at me, startled. “You made that promise to the person you thought was Evan. But that person doesn’t exist. The real Evan is a murderer. The real Evan lied to you about what was in those letters he gave you. And I have no doubt that he lied to you about what’s in those notebooks. You know what I think is in them?”

  Amanda looked at me warily. “N-no.”

  “Plans for the shootings. For Fairmont, for the Cinemark Theater, and probably for the ones he’s about to do. You saw what he wrote in those letters to me. He’s going to keep doing it until we stop him. If you don’t give us those notebooks, you’ll be helping him kill more innocent people.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut and began to sob. Bailey and I exchanged a look. We’d told her to forget what she’d believed—and wanted to believe for more than a year, that Evan Cutter was her Prince Charming—and believe what she’d just learned in the past hour: that he was a mass murderer. It was a hard turn for her to make. But after a few moments, Amanda swiped the back of her hand across her cheeks and stood up. “Come on.”

  We followed her into a bedroom that was surprisingly austere for a teenage girl. You could bounce a quarter off the perfectly made twin bed, and the two navy-and-red decorative pillows looked like they’d been positioned against the headboard with a T square. A few posters of bands I didn’t recognize were taped—not tacked—onto the wall. The oak dresser was bare of any cosmetics or jewelry, and there were no clothes on the floor or the bench at the foot of the bed. In fact, there wasn’t a hair out of place in the entire room.

  Dating Evan—if you could call it that—seemed to be Amanda’s only wild move. But talk about hitting the big leagues right out of the box. Amanda pulled the chair away from her small desk and dragged it to the shelving against the wall in the far right corner of the room. She climbed up on it, reached behind some tall books on the top shelf, and started to pull down manila envelopes completely encased in heavy wrapping tape.

  “Hold on,” Bailey said. She grabbed a box of Kleenex and covered her hands, then reached for the first envelope. I covered my hands and took it from Bailey, and placed it on Amanda’s desk. When we’d finished, there was a stack of nine envelopes.

  “Is this all of them?”

  Amanda nodded. “You can look around if you want to.” She swept her arm out to indicate her room.

  “And he didn’t send you anything else? Pictures? Books?” Amanda shook her head.

  “We’ll just check the rest of these shelves to make sure you didn’t miss anything, okay?”

  Amanda nodded. “Go ahead. But he only sent me the nine envelopes. I’m sure.”

  I felt reasonably certain she was telling the truth, but Bailey and I took a few minutes to look through the room anyway. We’d have officers do a more thorough search, just to check for any small things Amanda might’ve forgotten about. But right now, we needed to dig into those notebooks, and fast.

  If these were the writings the shrinks had talked about, they might tell us where Evan was planning to strike next. And if there was a third party involved—I thought of the lead Harrellson was working in San Diego—they might give us that person’s name. I was eager to get going, but I just had a couple more questions for Amanda. “When did Evan start sending you these envelopes?”

  “About a month after we moved here, I think.”

  “And when did you get the last one?”

  “Um…a few weeks ago?” Her brow furrowed, then she nodded. “Yeah, about three weeks ago because I asked him if he could come out for Homecoming, and he sent me a note with the last package saying he was going to be busy.”

  Boy, was he ever. “Did you keep that note?”

  Amanda nodded and went to her nightstand. She picked up a book—Girls: A Guy’s Perspective. I wanted to tell her that if she was trying to understand Evan, she’d have to get American Psycho. Amanda pulled out a piece of lined paper that had been folded and tucked into the middle. Bailey took the paper from her using the Kleenex. “Can you tell me where your mom keeps extra grocery bags?” Amanda told her, and while Bailey went to get them, I asked her my last few questions.

  “When Evan sent you the letters to mail to me, did he send a note to you with them? Or did he call you and tell you he was sending them?”

  “He called.” Amanda knew what the next question would be, and she didn’t wait for it. She pulled her cell phone out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and scrolled. She pointed to a number. “This is it. It’s around the right time, and I know all the other numbers on here.”

  “You don’t have a number for him?”

  “No. He uses burners. He says the government can track you on a cell phone, so he never uses a phone more than twice.”

  A lie to keep Amanda from having access to him? Or true? Given his distrust of emails, it might well be true, which meant the chance that we might be able to track him with this number was very slim. But slim or not, it was worth a try. I copied the call history on Amanda’s cell phone for the past two weeks and emailed it to myself.

  Amanda gestured to the notebooks piled on her desk. “Do you really think the plans for the Fairmont shooting are in there?”

  “Yes.” I took in Amanda’s pallor. “Do you feel well enough to go to school?”

  “I…yeah.” She turned away from the envelopes. “I want to be with my friends.”

  I got it. She needed to reassure herself that she’d made some good choices too.
And that there was a normal world out there. “Okay, we’ll take you.”

  Bailey returned with paper grocery bags, and we put the envelopes into them, packing the note to Amanda separately to preserve prints. We told Janice we were done and that we’d take Amanda to school. She and Amanda held each other in a long hug.

  We all trooped out to Bailey’s car. Amanda gave us directions to her school. It was past ten o’clock by the time we dropped her off.

  I got out of the car with her. “Remember to call us immediately if you hear from him, okay?”

  I didn’t think Evan would make contact with her now. He was in full attack mode. But you never know. If he got desperate, he might show up with some cockamamy story about how the psycho killers were after him. The kind of story she might’ve believed just a little over an hour ago, but surely wouldn’t now. I hoped.

  Amanda nodded. “I will. I promise.”

  I watched her move slowly up the front steps, bent forward under the weight of her backpack. She looked like the same girl who’d woken up that morning. But she wasn’t. She’d just learned that the boy she’d loved and trusted was a soulless monster who had used her and lied to her. The world would never look the same to her again.

  73

  Bailey put out the alert for Evan Cutter. When she ended the call, I gestured to the notebooks that were now packed in grocery bags in the backseat. “We can’t wait for Dorian. We need to tear into those things.”

  “Definitely,” Bailey said. “And we’ve got to let Harrellson know—”

  “I’ll try him now.”

  I couldn’t get any signal. When we got back to the hotel, I got Harrellson’s voice mail and left a message saying it was urgent. I hoped he’d cleared Mark Unger. One missing psychopath was plenty. Bailey called Graden and filled him in, while I found us a three o’clock flight back to L.A. Then Bailey took out her Swiss Army knife and sliced through the tape on all of the envelopes.

  At Graden’s request we headed straight to his office with the notebooks. Now, we reread them over his shoulder. The first line encapsulated the running theme throughout all of them.